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Aerospace Engineering

Master's Theses - Daytona Beach

Theses/Dissertations

1996

Fatigue

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Detection Of Fatigue Crack Growth In A Simulated Aircraft Fuselage, Michael Lee Marsden Oct 1996

Detection Of Fatigue Crack Growth In A Simulated Aircraft Fuselage, Michael Lee Marsden

Master's Theses - Daytona Beach

Acoustic emission (AE) nondestructive testing can detect fatigue cracks as they occur in complex structures. One use for AE has been in-flight detection of fatigue cracks in aircraft. The KC-135 aircraft were successfully monitored as early as 1979. The main problem with this and subsequent applications was an unfavorable signal to noise ratio, the key being to separate the small amplitude crack signals from the large amplitude ambient noise. This was accomplished here through the use of a Kohonen self-organizing map (SOM) neural network.

In order to simulate a fuselage undergoing fatigue, a pressure vessel was constructed from a 0.040 …